# Kahanism The ultranationalist Jewish-supremacist ideology of **Meir Kahane** (1932–1990), which holds that Jewish and non-Jewish populations cannot coexist within the Land of Israel and that the state should be governed by halakha and cleared of its Arab population. It is the vault's most complete documented case of **a political tradition travelling from criminal proscription to cabinet office within a single generation** — and its point of origin is Brooklyn. ## The sequence | Date | Event | |---|---| | 1932 | Kahane born in **Brooklyn, New York** | | 1968 | Founds the **Jewish Defense League** in New York — armed neighbourhood patrols, then a campaign of bombings and harassment against Soviet targets | | 1971 | Emigrates to Israel; founds **Kach** | | 1984 | Elected to the Knesset on roughly **26,000 votes**; subsequent polling suggests his party could win as many as twelve seats | | 1985 | The Knesset amends **Basic Law: The Knesset** to bar parties inciting racism | | 1988 | **Kach is disqualified** from the election on that basis | | 5 Nov 1990 | Kahane **assassinated in Manhattan** by El Sayyid Nosair | | 25 Feb 1994 | **Baruch Goldstein**, a Kach member and American-born physician, murders 29 Muslim worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron | | 1994 | Israel **outlaws Kach and Kahane Chai** as terrorist organisations | | 1997 / 2004 | The United States designates **Kahane Chai** and then **Kach** as Foreign Terrorist Organizations | | May 2022 | The United States **revokes** the FTO designations, citing insufficient evidence of continued activity | | Dec 2022 | **[[Itamar Ben-Gvir]]** — leader of Otzma Yehudit, six seats — becomes **Minister of National Security**, with authority over the Israeli police | Ben-Gvir kept a portrait of Goldstein in his living room for years and removed it in 2020; the IDF declined to draft him as a security risk; he has attended Kahane memorial events, which the US State Department publicly called "abhorrent" in 2022. ## The American origin, and the return Kahanism is not a case of American conservatism importing a foreign idea. It is the reverse: a movement founded in **New York**, in the specific conditions of late-1960s American urban politics — a Jewish community that felt abandoned by liberal institutions, formed armed patrols, and produced a leader who generalised the grievance into an ideology — which then **emigrated, was proscribed by the receiving country's parliament and government, survived the proscription, and entered its cabinet fifty-four years after its founding.** > [!important] ⭐ The finding: proscription is a delay, not a disposal, unless something replaces the demand > Israel did everything the [[Greek History Hub]] model recommends: a legal disqualification test written into a Basic Law, a terrorism designation, and prosecution of the associated violence. **The tradition returned anyway**, under a new party name, through the ordinary coalition arithmetic of a 120-seat chamber in which 61 seats is everything. Greece's answer worked because the organisation was destroyed *and* the conditions that fed it eased; Israel's second half never happened. **Banning a party removes a vehicle. It does not remove a constituency**, and where the electoral system makes small blocs pivotal, the constituency will find another vehicle. > [!important] ⭐ The second finding: a terrorism designation is a live political instrument, not a permanent record > The US delisting in **May 2022** and Ben-Gvir's appointment in **December 2022** are seven months apart. Whatever the legal reasoning, the sequence is a reminder that FTO designations are administrative acts subject to review and to diplomacy. **Where this vault treats a designation as evidence about an organisation, it should record who was in office when it was made and when it was lifted.** ## Distinguishing it from the rest of the Israeli right Kahanism is not [[Revisionist Zionism]]. Jabotinsky wrote a draft constitution guaranteeing Arab civil equality; Kahane's programme was the removal of the Arab population and the replacement of the state's legal basis with religious law. Collapsing the two makes the current Israeli coalition unreadable — the significant fact about the 2022 government is precisely that a [[Likud]]-led cabinet took in a party from a tradition that Likud's own founders would not have seated. ## See Also - [[Israeli History Hub]] · [[Zionism]] · [[Revisionist Zionism]] · [[Likud]] - [[Itamar Ben-Gvir]] · [[Benjamin Netanyahu]] · [[Israel]] - [[Greek History Hub]] — the comparative case where proscription finished the job - [[Italian History Hub]] · [[German History Hub]] — the other national answers to the same question - [[Ethnonationalism]] · [[Antisemitism]] · [[Ethnic Cleansing]]